Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Thursday, January 21, 2010

My Country, 'Tis Of Thee

A new professional basketball league boasting rosters made up exclusively of white Americans has its eyes set on Augusta, but the team isn't receiving a warm welcome.

[yap yap]

Don "Moose" Lewis, the commissioner of the AABA, said the reasoning behind the league's roster restrictions is not racism.

"There's nothing hatred about what we're doing," he said. "I don't hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here's a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like."

Lewis said he wants to emphasize fundamental basketball instead of "street-ball" played by "people of color." He pointed out recent incidents in the NBA, including Gilbert Arenas' indefinite suspension after bringing guns into the Washington Wizards locker room, as examples of fans' dissatisfaction with the way current professional sports are run.

"Would you want to go to the game and worry about a player flipping you off or attacking you in the stands or grabbing their crotch?" he said. "That's the culture today, and in a free country we should have the right to move ourselves in a better direction."

A U.S. Airways jet was diverted to Philadelphia International Airport Thursday after a praying Jewish man's religious item was mistaken for a bomb, police said.

[snip]

Officials said a passenger had become alarmed by seeing a man with phylacteries — boxes containing verses from the Bible — which observant Jews strap around their arms and heads as part of morning prayers.

"Someone on the plane construed it as some kind of device," said Christine O'Brien, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Police Department.

A man was escorted off the plane by law enforcement officers while the other passengers also disembarked. O'Brien confirmed that no one had been arrested and no one had been charged.

Senior law enforcement officials told NBC News that they believe the man was a "nervous flier" and said they did not believe the incident was related to terrorism.

Since they were going to Kentucky, I'd be a lot more worried about their fellow citizens.

When Haitians leave Haiti for the U.S. they get richer almost overnight. This isn’t simply because wages are higher here or welfare payments more generous. Coming to America is a cultural leap of faith, physically and psychologically. Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz note in their phenomenal new book, From Poverty to Prosperity, that low-skilled Mexican laborers become 10 to 20 times more productive simply by crossing the border into the United States. William Lewis, former director of the McKinsey Global Institute, found that illiterate, non-English-speaking Mexican agricultural laborers in the U.S. were four times more productive than the same sorts of laborers in Brazil.

Why? Because American culture not only expects hard work, but teaches the unskilled how to work hard.